


Won't You Wake Up

by swamplamp



Category: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 19:08:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6436744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swamplamp/pseuds/swamplamp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Emmett and Michelle do is kind of like a game of Chicken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Won't You Wake Up

**Author's Note:**

> Gosh, I don't know why I wrote this.

In his dreams, Emmett sees angry yellow sparks fly this way and that. The sparks spew out of a firecracker the size of a toilet paper roll and just as hollow. He puts his hand out to feel the heat or the light. To feel anything. The next thing he knows, the palm of his hand disintegrates before his eyes and the skin crackles and screams, but he doesn’t make a sound.

He pulls himself out of sleep and his heart is racing. His chest feels light, as if his body is telling him _You're allowed to hyperventilate now_. Real considerate.

Howard never, never shuts off those goddamn fluorescent lights. Emmett brought up the issue of energy conservation on his first night here and Howard only gave him the stink eye.

Emmett figures, the day he gets used to sleeping with those lights on will be the day Howard finally takes him out. Hah hah.

Emmett resolves that his spot in the glorified storage closet is a good one. He’s gotten into the habit of greeting Howard audibly—not for Howard’s sake and not for his own. Howard has to get past him to get to Michelle.

Like clockwork: “Morning, Howard. Slept well last night?” Howard is like a damn mountain, especially with Emmett sitting on the floor and Howard standing tall like he got a great night's sleep. Emmett knows he could never square off against him. But if it came to it, he'd try. Never been in a fight in his damn life, but he would try.

Emmett rarely gets a response. So he sits there on his cushion thing to watch Howard’s morning greeting addressed to Michelle, in which Howard revs his _Daddy made you breakfast_ tone up to a million and Emmett tries his best not to heave into the canned corn.

See, Emmett’s greeting is a nudge at Michelle. It buys her enough time to wake up before Howard barges in. The nudges are something that he and Michelle do for each other. And Emmett likes to think that Howard doesn't suspect a thing.

His friends in school used to play Chicken. They played it a lot of different ways. By seventh grade, Bloody Knuckles had gotten old. A game of Chicken was all about bodily crashing into each other. They would run full speed at each other on the back fields of dried out crabgrass. The more times they did it, the more often one person or the other veered off in the other direction to avoid collision. A lot of the time, Emmett came home sporting bruised collar bones and shoulders. Ma never noticed.

Stupidly, his friends had picked up the game when word got around that Zachary Leavins died playing Chicken in a car that didn't belong to him. Emmett's best friend Noah's brother was in the opposing car. That was when Emmett realized how deeply he was in a hick town. Takes one to know one.

What Emmett and Michelle do is kind of like a game of Chicken. They square their shoulders and run headfirst into Howard's wrath, willing it to collide with them. She probably didn't know it, but the first time Michelle played Chicken with Howard was that first dinner when she snatched his keys from right under his nose. It was the touch to Emmett's hand over the table. That's how it started.

She came away with a bruise, but it wasn't from Howard cornering her against the wall and getting up in her face. Her injury was in seeing that woman outside die. Michelle nursed the wounds like Emmett's friends did in the beginnings. They hid it. They just didn't hide it well.

Emmett could feel Michelle's guilt fizzing off her like bubbles from the opened mouth of a beer can. That hundred mile stare seared the side of his shoulder.

"She would've died even if you let her in," Emmett reassured her. You bet he was bullshitting. But he figures it's a nice sentiment. He bites his tongue to keep himself from asking how messed up the lady looked. He's imagined a lot of nasty effects, based off of what he's seen from Frank and Mildred.

Michelle nudged mostly when Howard wasn't in the room. She emerges from her cell after Howard lumbers back into the kitchen. She shuffles out, in no hurry. Still no socks. He could imagine the concrete floor scuffing her heels. Emmett stands to greet her and she stands in front of him. She runs a thumb across his slinged arm as if admiring it. But she's not smiling when she says under her breath, "Thank you."

If Howard wasn't involved, this would've been more like a game of Tag. Tag lacks danger. You're it, you're it. It's like an exchange. With Chicken, there's something at stake. There's you and the crash. See, Tag would be about Emmett-and-Michelle. But that's not what this is. Not at all.

Emmett bats away the worry that Howard will someday poison his food and takes a seat at the breakfast table. If he wasn't sure Howard was in the Navy before, he'd find real live confirmation in the yellow mush of his powdered eggs. He would take on the role of cook himself, but he doesn't have much to offer there.

Emmett's mom wasn't much of the cook type either. Like Howard, she served up stifling silence and the looming reminder of death. Sorry, no. That's a little harsh. But there is something about this vault that reminds Emmett of his middle school years at home.

Michelle brings him out of it. Away from it.

Emmett can smell city on her from yards away. Even with a brace around her knee, she carries herself very much unlike the heavy-footed laborers around these parts. She keeps elbows in and fingers light. Over jet plane puzzles and lukewarm powdered coffee, he asks, "Did you grow up here?"

She tears herself from her folding of a torn-out magazine page, looks at him like she didn't hear him the first time. She answers, "No. I, uh. I grew up in Colorado. Came to Louisiana for school. Stayed."

Emmett can't help but laugh. "Why in the hell would you go out of your way to study here?"

"It seemed like an interesting idea at the time: you know, that distance from home?"

Michelle always teeters somewhere between intention and aimlessness. Emmett thought it was shock at first, then he wondered if it was a clever tactic against Howard. And now, talking to her, Emmett sometimes believes that that's just how she is.

She's sitting cross-legged on the armchair next to the couch. Emmett wouldn't have the balls to put his feet up on the couch. She gets away with a lot of things. That's kind of what this is about: what she can get away with, because it's a step closer to _getting away_.

Across the side of her knee, Michelle folds her square of paper in half to make it a triangle, then in half again for a smaller triangle. The paper is pliant and crinkled at this point because she's made so many folds and then undone them.

"I wanted to see the water." She shrugs.

"Sure is plenty of water south. Did you get to see it?"

"Yeah."

Emmett never realized that he needed talk. He needed conversation to feel closeness. He didn't realize it until he stood next to Michelle on the first day he really had a conversation with her. "Are you making something?"

She looks up at him rigidly like she's caught her in the act of something suspicious. Emmett finds that altogether hilarious and alarming. He motions to the creased up paper in her lap. The startled edge in her eyes softens. "Sure."

"You never read the magazines, do you?"

"No," she says, back to folding. "They bother me."

Emmett thinks he knows what she means. He asks cautiously, "Is it because they belong to dead girls?"

Michelle shows teeth when she laughs at the suggestion. "You know, that's probably what I should be bothered by more. But no. I'm more offended by the overwhelming heteronormativity and patriarchal language. No wonder Howard kept them."

This time, he doesn't want to admit that he doesn't understand. He nods gravely to suggest that he does.

"These are almost a decade old. It's shocking to find that not much has changed since then." She sits back to hold a paper crane in front of her face to observe it closely. It droops and slouches, but the wrinkled wings flap when she tugs at the neck and tail.

 

"Good morning, Howard."

"It's not morning," Howard scowls. He grits his teeth as he barrels past Emmett. He spits vitriol, the angriest clock in the world: "It's two o'clock in the afternoon."

Emmett sidles up against a wire shelf with a grin. "Well, I'm glad you're keeping track. Thanks for that."

He stands back as Howard fills Michelle's doorway. If it's two o'clock, he's not sure why Howard is hanging around here. In all likelihood, Howard prefers that he and Michelle stay in his line of sight.

"I'm about to put a movie on," Emmett hears Howard say. "Hunt for Red October. You're welcome to join me. It's a classic."

He knows this part: Howard invites Michelle to do something in the living room, then he idles at the doorway until Michelle gets up to join him. It generally takes a count of six seconds before Howard gets a response, but he never backs down. It's not a suggestion.

Emmett hears shuffling and knows it as the sound of Michelle rising to her feet with difficulty. Howard leans into the chamber to help her, Emmett leans in to stop him.

"I'm fine," Michelle murmurs, staving away any motion to help her out. Howard turns and starts off towards the living room. Emmett acts casual.

"Hey, Emmett." Michelle greets him with a mock telephone courtesy tone. She bumps a shoulder against his good arm, a tiny nudge. "We're going to watch a movie. You should join us."

Emmett doesn't even need to see Howard's face to know his expression. "That sounds great."

 

When Michelle says that she has enough material to make one suit, he knows. He gets it. This is her story. So he supports. He listens to Michelle as her plans tumble out of her mouth, for once thinking out loud. She speaks with syllables stacked on syllables because this is hers to have. Her chance of escape. She knows what she's doing.

All he knows is that she has to-- _has to_ \--survive this thing.

Emmett never actually won a game of Chicken. He was always too afraid of the collision. He has been known to flinch. That's what got him into this mess in the first place. He ran at the first flicker he spotted. Not his finest hour, but what he's doing now sort of makes up for getting his face not melted.

When the time comes and everything Michelle planned falls into place, would he call this a win or a loss?

He watches the set of her jaw and her hands nimbly wielding the box cutter to the tacky vinyl of the shower curtain. She slashes and zips, precision of every mark bolstered only by her own momentum. In his line of work, he's comparatively very slow at cutting or marking. His guesswork is shit and he realized early on that it's seriously indicative of his commitment issues. She should've been a carpenter. She should've been a lot of things. She could be, still.

So here they are: Emmett leaning against the doorframe reading magazines made for hopelessly romantic teenage girls and Michelle there madly hunched over strips of raw material to construct a crude hazmat suit. Emmett wouldn't take the end of the world any other way.

 

When the time comes, he blurts nonsense about wanting Michelle's respect because it's the last nudge he could think of. That's his reach out to Michelle. One last time.

He knows the next part. He's seen it coming before this goddamn shelter was even built.

_Tag, you're it._


End file.
